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Co-location for personal servers?
Is there such thing as a colocation for personal machines?
For example, I might have an old PC which I would like to host on a dedicated line, but I can't use my own internet connection. Is there a cheap-ish service that can host my box (in the region of £2-3pm?
Thanks
Edit: Doing a bit more googling, this seems pretty difficult - I think it's generally cheaper to rent a VPS still.
Comments
Probably not in a datacenter. You have also to include power, redundant power-supply, occupied space in the datacenter, etc.
2 - 3 GBP per month is not enough to pay for the power used by a typical old PC. By far. Also a typical PC in tower case takes 4U rack space.
If your budget is that low, get a VPS.
If it's a smallish machine it would fit in a locker at colocker MK but it will cost you a LOT more than £2-3
At first I thought you made a typo (£20-30/mo?), however, no, this won't happen at all.
Sorry about the gif, I couldn't help myself :-)
As @rds100 said, just the power will cost way more than £3/month.
Add some cool fans
Maybe some 'hardware' RAID
State of the art operating system, 64 boots
On the serious note £2-3p will take you nowhere, you're better off with some cheap VPS.
Maybe one of those online.net €1.99 euro servers would be good for you (if you can snag one)
Click to see more of this state of the art facility
There are DCs offering non-standard form factor colocation, I believe even Hetzner does some.
But yeah, the cost would be nowhere near 2-3 GBP.
Even in some rookie facility (
someone's basement) with no redundant power or Internet.Hetzner did, but now only offers 19" colocation. Their own dedicated servers are however mainly towers (anything except the large storage SX and the Dell line basically).
Even if we assume:
1.: Space is essentially free (which it isnt, but realistically a cheaply built (converted) DC in a vast large country/city can be less than 10EUR/m^2 and thus only a few cents per U) - Lets say 5U @ 25c (10EUR/m^2) = 1.25EUR/Month
2.: Cheapest possible power (Iceland by non-subsidized power (5c/kwh), Kuwait by subsidy (1c/kwh)), with 400W usage (realistic for anything older than 2010) and NO power calculated in for AC/UPS or costs for genset - 3EUR to 15EUR/Month
3.: Cheapest possible BW (without considering overselling) at 0.5/Mbit (0.5EUR/330GB or 0.15EUR/100GB) - 0.5EUR
Comes out to a total of at LEAST 4.75EUR (which is pretty near 3GBP) - But you'll never find anything like that.
Realistically you can get extremely cheap colocation in some parts of the US (Denver for some reason) and even in EU (Czech Republic, Poland) but nothing below ~35-40$.
Best available deal is most likely CEUServers (FDCServers) 26EUR package with 10Mbit unmetered and no note of power usage (Probably ~100W)-
Not worth the effort. Better off renting a server or a VPS.
Cheapest I know and seem legit are around 25€
http://www.weesly.de/tower-housing-colocation.html
https://www.active-servers.com/towerhousing.php
Do a search on Raspberry Pi colocation to get an idea for the the lower limit you could expect for such a scenario. It is in the range given, but only barely, and the RPi isn't exactly a resource intensive machine.
Next step up would be something like a Mac mini colo, which is going to run you upwards of 10x the price, and that is a pretty modest machine by "personal machines" standards, too. A generic "old PC" is going consume something like 5x the space and power of a mini, so multiply your budget accordingly.
There's coolhousing.net as well
YES! That is exactly what I'm looking for. I think what I'll do is load a My RPi V1 Model B with a 128GB SD Card and 8GB USB stick for ZRAM, then send it in for colocation. That seems like the best deal for me
In the Netherlands we have a club called Coloclue for this, maybe there are some in your country as well. It comes down to no profit, which means it's cheap and there are other members as well.
You could, but surely the PI2 would be much nicer for that.
£2 to £3 per month? I presume you also pay that for your Gas, Electric, Council Tax etc?
I wouldn't even colo you an ethernet cable for that!..
Yeah, but I have a spare Pi1 lying about, and I don't think I need the extra power or RAM (I've got zram for that), so it's probably ok to use the one I've got
http://www.colocker.com/
Only .5amp for power, doesn't seem like enough, I guess you could go to 2amps but that ups the cost then.
@240v don't forget, It depends what you want to put in there,
I had 2x j1900 celeron based ITX machines, a router, KVM and external quad bay HDD caddy in there and they didn't charge for extra power (I was somewhat surprised at that)
At the moment I have 1x C2750 based machine in a Silverstone DS380 case (Wanted lots of drive bays) and a router.
I might put one of the J1900's back in or a Nuc/Pi2 at somepoint, probably then I might need to upgrade to 1A power as I'd imagine the c2750 draws a fair bit given although it's a low power CPU it's also it's got 5x 3.5" HDD and 2x 2.5" SSD in already.
With that budget just find a VPS, colo costs are way higher.
Sending old equipment to a datacenter will prove costly as it's more likely to break and require remote hands.
As you mentioned, it will be more cost effective to just get a VPS. You'll have a higher quality experience, not have to worry about shipping the server, and you won't have to worry about hardware failures.
Edit - I should also add that with a VPS you're basically subsidizing the cost of a dedicated server, but with multiple tenants you can save money when others share resources and help pay for support staff.
I second this.